


Imagine You and Me

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Other, Self-cest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 12:41:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You suppose that the first face you ever, ever had was probably your parents’ face.</p>
<p>You wonder which one but they never tell you. You remember they showed you a picture and then that was your face. You wanted to know if they wouldn’t miss your old face —what if they never recognized you again? What if they never saw themselves in you again?</p>
<p>They said they loved you no matter what face you wore, and you believed them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Imagine You and Me

**Author's Note:**

> For Anon who wanted more Monster Self-cest, and for Simone, Callowyn, Sasha, Suhair, and harmalade who gave me monsters. (selfcest and vague reference to breathplay)

You suppose that the first face you ever, ever had was probably your parents’ face.

You wonder which one but they never tell you. You remember they showed you a picture and then that was your face. You wanted to know if they wouldn’t miss your old face —what if they never recognized you again? What if they never saw themselves in you again?

They said they loved you no matter what face you wore, and you believed them.

You never asked why you moved all the time, and why they were so careful to stay in towns that were small and tiny, without eyes, they said, and you didn’t care either because this was home, no matter where you were.

And you made friends at the small town schools, and they liked you, and you remembered to never change your face because even though you knew your parents would know you, you knew your friends would never be so perceptive.

But then they came, and they took your parents away with a silver bullet, and you escaped maybe because even they couldn’t just kill a kid, but you knew they would never stop hunting you, and for the first time, you wish they had been wrong about this thing, this one thing, but you know that parents are never wrong.

You can’t keep your face because you can’t stay a little kid forever, but you wish you could. 

You change your face every day so that the people who took your parents would never know you.

You have no home.

You are alone. 

You smell like old newspaper and sometimes words stay on your skin. You don’t read them so you don’t remember. 

You are tired of your human face no matter how many times you change it, no matter how many times you hook your fingers into your eye sockets, and lift your tacked on lips, your gelatinous eyes, your crooked, broken noses, your skin sewn together with freckles and blood from your body until the cool air hits the rawness you hide with a softness that makes you shudder until you can grow something new that isn’t really yours to cover the parts of you that are sore all over.

And when it’s over, and you’re there all splattered on the floor, juicy flesh and guts and sticky blood oozing into cement cracks, you think you’ve never seen something so ugly, so you kick it aside with your shoes, newly tied with frayed, knotted laces, the ones with the holes in the soles, and you’re so glad you never have to look at something so awful again, and you wonder how all these people can bare the weight of the faces you kick down sewer pipes, to be flushed away with toilet water and you think, good riddance.

You don’t know how, but you’ve wandered to a water’s edge and it smells like salt and you wonder which ocean you’ve wandered to, but you suddenly don’t care because there, right there, there are seals sunning themselves on rocks, and they jump and play in the water, and you wonder if they have to worry about people hunting them too. 

You figure there is always somebody hunting someone, so even if there are people hunting these seals, you know that the people hunting you won’t expect you to take an animal, even though they hunt you like one.

You shed your human skin one more time, and take the shape of a seal.

You love the water—you’ve only ever liked the water before.

It hurts to want something so bad, to want to feel the water against your flippers, to want to play.

It’s like your bones are breaking all over again, only this time they don’t snap back into place, whole no matter how many times they shatter.

You hate this.

But you sleep well for the first time in days, so you think you can deal with the hurt that makes your head swell with the weight of your memories. 

You wonder how you don’t sink under how heavy you feel, but for the first time, you trust your body to keep you alive out here in the water.

Sometimes people come to the beach, and they throw bread for the birds and they point and clap their hands for the seals, for you. 

You remember the last time someone saw you, how they pointed a gun at you. How you wonder, even now, if they have guns tucked in their back pockets, waiting to see whatever thing it was that betrayed your parents to them, and you slip into the water and swim deep so that their gaze cannot touch you.

But you miss being held and you miss being touched and the water is cold but your parents were warm, and you wonder how the other seals don’t feel it like you do, and one night when a group of teenagers hold a kegger on the beach, when everyone is too drunk to care or to shoot straight and you see them laughing and cooing at the seals, begging them to come here, come here, come here boy, come here girl, what a good seal, you splash out to them, and you step out from the seal skin into someone you’d changed into once before, how long ago you don’t remember, and you step towards someone with a jaw gaping like a fish, and you let them put their hands on your shoulder and you let them touch their mouth to yours and you kiss them right back, slipping right into the warm wet sea of their mouth, and they asked if you were a selky and you said that you were because you could be anything or anybody and the realization crashes down on you like a cold ocean wave and your body’s washed in an ice cold sweat of anticipation as you leave the one behind you because you pick up your seal skin, clutched tight in your hand.

You think you’re a riddle, that your existence is a riddle that can’t be solved. Maybe that’s why the hunters try so hard to find you, to find your kind, the way your eyes flashed in a way that theirs didn’t.

Maybe they were frustrated that they didn’t know why, that you were a puzzle they just couldn’t solve, and maybe, like Alexander cut the knot instead of trying to untie it, they just wanted to a put a bullet in you, slash you from the equation of their problem, and erase the question mark of your existence into something more final, more small like a period they could punch at the end of your sentence.

It’s easy to stand like this—a guardian of riddles, a guardian of you. Your chest is naked and your lion’s body muscles coil, ready for anything, and your wings ride the air, ready for the winds to come, and you wonder what riddle you would pose to people who, by chance, could pass you by (you are lost in the desert, you expect nobody). 

Who has four legs but walks on two and shoots fire from its eyes?

Who has the face of a man but the nose of a bloodhound and never stops hunting you?

What would you do if you were me?

That last one probably doesn’t count as a riddle but you wonder what you would do if you were you, what you should do, what your parents would want you to do if they could only tell you.

But now, it’s easier to wait for someone to find you, wait for you to ask them a riddle, wait for them to be able to answer it. You hope they won’t be able to, and you wonder how human flesh tastes, how it feels to devour someone as your lives have been consumed one by one.

Later, when you’ve found your way out of the desert, you’re very glad that no one found you on nights like those. You would probably change the answers to say they were wrong.

You tried to imagine yourself in that moment – your wings flared like a raptor, your haunches coiling to spring. It would be messy, you think, because your face was just a human face with human molars. You imagine you would have blood all over your lips and your teeth and your chin.

You would have red all over you.

That’s okay. You think you look good in red.

You have red on your lips right now.

You’re a cherry bomb, as they say. 

You put a stripe of red scales across the black shiny scales of your belly, a coiling spiral as you slither, watching the way the scales disappear like etched carvings into your skin, and you think you have never been more beautiful than you are right now. 

You coil your snake’s tail around your belly, squeezing soft until your breath tightens like a string wound tight in your lungs, and you watch your belly swell in and out, the black and red scales pulsing like a star. 

 You follow the pull of the muscle along your arm, trace the jutting edge of your clavicle, and you press your lips to your scales and your skin, and you think, I love you, I love you, I love you. 

No matter what face you wear.


End file.
